


the strings which make us dance

by shuofthewind



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Anger Management Fails, Angst, Bechdel Test Pass, Bisexual Female Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical language, Canonical Character Death, Catholic Guilt, Character Study, Female Friendship, Female Matt Murdock, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Misogyny, Male-Female Friendship, Mental Health Issues, Pre-Series, Rule 63, Somewhat Drabbly, fuck the patriarchy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-27
Updated: 2015-08-27
Packaged: 2018-04-17 11:54:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4665621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's only ever been one place for her, and that's in the dark.</p><p>[Welcome to the life of Matilda Mary Murdock.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	the strings which make us dance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [extasiswings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/gifts).



> Title from a quote by Charles Baudelaire.
> 
> _The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;  
>  We find delight in the most loathsome things;  
> Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,   
> And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance._
> 
> TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR: Islamophobia, parental abandonment, intimate partner abuse, murder, descriptions of graphic violence, mental health issues (barely touched upon, but Elektra is OCD if I remember correctly, so that's mentioned), mentions of rape/gang rape, mentions of date rape, emotional abuse, sexism, misogyny, internalized homophobia, and internalized misogyny. 
> 
> ...I think that covers everything. 
> 
> I might do more in this 'verse, I dunno. Maybe. Someday. (I blame you again, Chapel.)
> 
> Unbeta'ed.

Sometimes before the accident she lies awake and tries very, very hard to remember her mother.

Mattie’s not really sure what she’s trying to accomplish, in the beginning. In books, characters are always able to remember _something_. A scent. A voice. A hand in your hair, a faded smile. She lies awake for hours, her eyes squeezed shut, rifling through her memories for something. Even a word. Even a dream.

She never comes up with anything. She thinks she’s not _meant_ to. Girls like her don’t get mothers, she realizes. Mothers are for girls who aren’t accidents like she is, a child that was never supposed to exist. Mothers are for girls who aren’t spending their nights stitching up their fathers after a bad fight. Mothers are supposed to _want_ daughters, not leave them, which means something must be wrong with her, somewhere, just like Gran says. So when she can’t remember anything, no matter how hard she tries, she decides that that’s better. It’s certainly better than making something up, better than crafting a lie she’ll tell so often it becomes truth.

It’s funny later, when she thinks about it.

.

.

.

When she’s ten years old she punches Aaron Krawczyk in the face. He lives three buildings down from her, a whip-thin eighth grader who likes to mash mud into Daniela Ramirez’s hair because it frizzes out into an afro. She catches him with a rock in his hand and the Obayomis’ windshield smashed, and she can’t help it. The Obayomis keep an eye on her when her dad is out too late, make sure her homework’s all right when Jack’s too tired to look. They’re good people, they’re honest and they’re kind, but they’re Muslim and Mattie’s heard what people say about them in the neighborhood, she’s _heard_ people talking, and now here’s a rock and here’s broken glass and she’s so angry she could melt from it. (That’s just surface anger, but she doesn’t figure that out until an alley and blood on her palms and her father’s body in the dark.)

“You can’t do shit, Murdock,” says Krawczyk, and he laughs in her face. “What’re you gonna do, whine to your daddy?”

Matilda’s known how to hit people since before she could walk. Not because her dad taught her, or anything— _c’mon, Mattie, don’t turn out an old dirtbag like me, you can do so, so much more, you’re like your mom that way, always looking for a better place_ —but she’s grown up in a boxer’s world, she’s been ringside since before she could walk. Of course she knows how to throw a punch.

She hits him harder than she means to, or harder than she knows she could. He doesn’t just stumble back—he hits the ground like a meteorite, eyes crossing, blood pouring from his nose and mouth. Mattie flexes her hand, looking at him, because _she_ did that. There’s a split over her first two knuckles, her wrist is stinging a little, but she _did_ that, and Aaron Krawczyk is looking at her like she’s shattered something inside his skull. She expects him to get up, to go after her, but his eyes are huge. He doesn’t move.

“Leave them alone,” she tells him. “Or I’ll do it again. I’ll be watching you, Krawczyk.”

She doesn’t kick him while he’s down, because good people don’t do that. Still, she’s tempted.

When she tells her dad, though—God. He looks like someone’s just ripped his soul out through his nose. He shoots up out of his chair, grabs her shoulders, shakes her. “Don’t do that,” he says, his voice so loud it could be a shout. “Don’t do that, don’t _ever_ do that, you ever hurt someone again and I swear to God, Mattie—” and she wants to die because Jack has never been angry at her before, never looked scared of her before. He looks like he’s going to hit her, it’s that same look she sees in fights sometimes when he clenches his fist and just keeps going, and she’s so scared that she rips herself away from him and runs because she can’t think of what else to do.

She comes back at nearly midnight, shaking, soaking wet from rain. Her dad’s asleep at the dining table, waiting for her. Mattie washes the blood off of her fist (because it’s still there, crusted and dark) and crawls into his lap, even though they can’t afford another chair if this one breaks. He comes awake with a start, but when he realizes she’s crying, he says, “Ah, shit, Mattie, I’m sorry,” like it’s his fault, like it’s not something she’s done.

“He was hurting people.” Her cheeks burn. “He was _hurting_ people. He hits Dani, and he broke Mrs. Obayomi’s windshield. So—so I only wanted to make him stop, I couldn’t think of any other way to make him stop, Dad, I don’t—she needs that car to go to work, that’s not _fair—_ ”

“Life ain’t fair, _cara_.” Her dad hates speaking Irish, but it slips out sometimes, like he can’t help it. She loves the sound of it, rasping and reedy, like a flute that can only go very high or very low. “But I don’t want you stuck in it, not this way. Look at me.” His knuckles are worn and knobby and patchy all over with scars when he shows them to her. “You don’t want to turn out like your old man, Tilda, I promise you. You’re smarter than both of us put together. I don’t want you trapped here.”

“But he—”

“Mattie, when has fighting ever put me anywhere?” His jaw is swollen, his eye black. “You can do so much more than fight. Don’t let the devil catch up to you, not like he did with me.”

He means it as a joke. He says it all the time, especially now that Gran’s dead. When she was six and Gran leaned over to tell her that _devil’s inside you, child, you’re a Murdock, ain’t no other way to be_ , she’d had nightmares for a week. She’d gone to her dad, asked if it was true, that Murdocks had devils inside them, and he’d turned it into a running gag. _Better hurry up, Mattie, don’t let the devil catch up to you!_ It’s always a joke, but right now it doesn’t sound like one. He sounds rough and raw and so, so tired, and when she peeks at him out of the corner of her eye, it’s like she sees someone else looking back at her. When she goes into school the next morning and Krawczyk avoids her eyes, she feels the devil there, hanging, strangling her. Her knuckles ache.

 _You’re a Murdock,_ Gran says. _Ain’t no other way to be._

God, she misses her dad.

.

.

.

One night she wakes up in her hospital bed to find a woman sitting beside it. She smells like incense and metal and cloth, and she has one finger pressed to the back of Mattie’s wrist, salt staining her cheeks. She doesn’t say anything, just sits, like she’s holding a candlelight vigil for a dying person. An hour later, she’s gone again.

Mattie’s fairly certain it was a fever dream. Somehow, though, the incense woman gets caught up in her nightmares.

.

.

.

When they first put her into St. Agnes, she spends her nights screaming.

It was easier, when her dad was alive. (It’s her fault her dad is dead, she knows it as if it’s written into her marrow, he tried to help her and because of that he’s dead, and she can still feel the bullet hole against her fingers, slick blood and empty space, she’d heard all of it and she didn’t do _anything,_ didn’t say a word, didn’t ask, never told him the truth, and now he’s dead and she’s alone and their devils are going to break her, she knows it—) When Jack was alive, if she ever started to feel the world pressing in, she could focus on him, pick one part of him and just let her whole world become that. The way his bones sounded inside his hands, scraping against each other from old breaks, that was always good. Harsh breathing during a practice match. He was like a worrystone, keeping the world out, and now that he’s dead she can’t do it anymore. She lies on her bed and the world crushes her into dust, everything’s so _loud_ , she can hear a fly on the glass of the window and the crack of a hand across someone’s face and the dripping of gasoline inside a car engine, the dampness of a kiss, the squeal of bicycle tires on concrete. And the smells, God, the smells are worse, _please, God, why did you do this to me, I want to be dead, I want to be dead instead of endure this, someone let me die_ because she can smell _everything_ and her head is always splitting, the touch of cotton sheets makes her feel like daggers are slicing her open, the air tastes rank with exhaust and sweat and tears and blood and humanity, and she wants to die, she can’t help it, she doesn’t want to live in a world that’s like this, so full of the monsters that her dad had always lied about and told her never existed—

“Christ,” says a voice, and she can barely make him out over the cacophony, over the deluge. “Quit your girly screaming, you’re making my ears bleed and getting the nuns all constipated.”

“ _I can’t_ ,” she says, and it’s closer to a howl even if she can barely speak above a whisper. Her own damn voice is too loud, talking hollows her out like a drum, she can feel _everything_ that goes into it, vocal cords and breath and the flicker of her tongue, the click of teeth and the snap of the words in her mouth.

“Don’t be a pussy,” says the voice. There’s a hand on her forehead and her whole body arches, trying to get away from it. The fingers press down hard against her skin. “Listen to my voice, dipshit,” says the man, and it _is_ a man, he smells like hobos smell almost, sweat beneath dirty clothes, hair is rupturing through the skin of his cheeks, he hasn’t shaved, he ate eggs two days ago and the smell hangs heavy in the back of her throat, and he has a stick, a cane, hollow, there’s a hole in his sock and his hands are all over calluses, the bones inside broken and scraping just like her dad’s. “Listen to my voice,” he says again, and Mattie gags on her own tongue and listens to his hands instead, drowning in the texture and the echoes.

It takes years, or minutes, or seconds, or millennia. There’s nothing but his bones and the rasp of his breathing, and she’s tried to do this with other people but none of them could steady her like her dad could, she always feel wrong and sick to listen to them like this, they’re not her business, they’re not _hers_ , but she can listen just for a while and pretend that her father’s not dead because of her, and slowly she starts to breathe like the sort of normal person she’s not. Her eyes burn, sting. There’s sores on the insides of her lips. Her whole body aches as if she’s been run over by a truck ( _and that’s hilarious, Mattie, just keep coming up with those and you’ll be able to go back to how it was, won’t you?_ ) but when she licks her lips, the sound doesn’t deafen her.

“Jesus, you’re dramatic.” She can make out a little more of him now, and a little less. He holds himself like a dancer does, on the balls of his feet, but he’s proportioned wrong, his muscles bunched up in the wrong places. Like how she imagines an acrobat would sound, she decides finally. She feels dizzy and wonders when she last ate. “You have the whole flock of goddamn crows fluttering around you like you’re having a psychotic break. Stop being such a hysterical baby.”

She doesn’t flinch. She wants to, but she’s too tired. Mattie swallows, ignoring the scrape against her throat. “Who are you?”

“I’m the lucky son of a bitch who gets to deal with you. Must have won the freakin’ lottery.” He draws his hand away from her forehead. “You wanna keep screaming, whatever, you can keep doing that, I don’t give a shit. I have a million things to do today and exactly none of them are dealing with you and your goddamn bitchfit.” He taps his cane twice on the floor, and the sound is only a touch, and not a blow. “If you’re done throwing your little tantrum, though, put your glasses on and grab your stick. We’re going for a walk.”

He says it the same way he tells her _I’m not here to be your daddy, little girl_ , hard and intractable. Some part of her wonders if the world would have been better off if God had just listened and struck her dead before Stick came.

.

.

.

Sister Eugenie panics when Mattie comes back to St. Agnes with her hair cut short enough to sting.

“But _why_?” She pets at Mattie’s head. She doesn’t wear rings, but there’s a mark on her left ring finger from an old wedding, an old marriage. Mattie doesn’t know what happened to it. “Your hair was lovely, Matilda, why would you cut it all off?”

 _Shit’s dangerous_ , Stick says in the back of her head. _You leave your hair like that, you lose your head. Stop being such a girl about it._

“I dunno,” she says, and Sister Eugenie pinches her wrist, because _grammar_ , _Matilda, contractions make my head ache._ “It felt like the right thing to do.”

Sister Eugenie purses her lips. She keeps petting Mattie’s head. She’s very tall, is Sister Eugenie, and she carries herself like she used to be much wider, edging through the world as if she’s afraid to break something. “But your _hair_ ,” she says, and Mattie leans away.

“It’s just hair. It grows back.”

“Yeah,” says Mary Sue. Mary Sue sleeps in the room next to Mattie’s. She’s an orphan like in Charles Dickens, no parents, not even a hint of a family anywhere. Just a kid on the doorstep in the middle of the night. She’s been here since before she could walk, and no matter how many families take her in, she keeps getting dragged back, like there’s a chain around her ankle. “It’s just hair, Sister Eugenie, God. Besides, now you don’t have to worry about whether or not you look like you crawled out from under a hedge, Murdock. Kudos.”

Mattie ducks her head to hide her smile behind her hair before she realizes that won’t work anymore. Still, Sister Eugenie creeps away fretfully, and Mary Sue claps Mattie twice on the shoulder before wandering away to break into the computer room again.

Stick doesn’t comment when she comes in that night, but he doesn’t grab her braid and yank her around by it anymore, simply because she’s had the damn thing cut off. Her scalp thanks her, even if the nuns don’t.

.

.

.

It’s not Stick who gives her the idea, really, but Mary Sue—Skye, she corrects, Skye is what she wants to be called, so she’ll call her Skye—sitting on the end of Mattie’s bed when they’re both seventeen and hating St. Agnes so much it’s like an open sore. “People don’t realize how much eye contact means.”

Mattie, doing homework, cocks her head. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean, you probably do,” Skye says thoughtfully, rocking back and forth. “But that’s beside the point. Like, I was on the subway today, and these two people were arguing? And I just kind of went between them, and they stopped. It’s like breaking a circuit. You can’t get into a fight with someone between you.”

She’s not sure why Skye decided to tell her this. Then again, she’s not sure why Skye decides to do anything, and that includes running away from St. Agnes once every three months. Mattie can time the world by it.

Still, it sticks in her head, the idea. _You can’t get into a fight with someone between you._ When she gets accepted to Columbia, it clings. She goes to parties with Foggy (that is, until Foggy decides parties are a bad idea) and she realizes that it’s so, so simple to just—stop things. She doesn’t even have to do what Stick does, doesn’t have to hurt people. She smells drugs in a drink, she knocks it over. She hears the start of a fight, she slips in between. Nobody wants to hurt the blind girl. Nobody even wants to touch her. She moves, and creates waves.

It works, until it doesn’t.

.

.

.

“Hey,” says a voice. “You’re the Murdock girl, right?”

Mattie’s fumbling with her keys, trying to balance take-out and her Braille textbook (and it was _so expensive_ , even more so than regular college textbooks, she hates capitalism so much right now) and even though she hears him coming, his footsteps are soft enough on the carpet that she makes herself jump. There’s a part of her inside that cries a little bit when her box of spring rolls slips off the textbook, but the guy, whoever he is, darts forward fast enough to catch them. “Jesus, sorry.” He sounds like he’s about to hit himself. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s okay.” She holds out her hand, and he puts the box of food back into it. Mattie gives her keys up for a lost cause, for the moment. “Yeah, I’m the Murdock. Why?”

“I mean—uh.” The guy, whoever he is, bounces on the balls of his feet. He lives three doors down from her, across the hall. The one who sings 4 Non Blondes under his breath all the time, and shouts at the WiFi when it won’t connect with his computer. “Sorry if this is weird. Are you from Hell’s Kitchen?”

She goes still, just for a moment. Mattie swallows, and makes herself cock her head, like it’s not a question that makes her want to scream. “Yeah, why?”

“You’re that girl!” he shouts in triumph, and points at her. “I heard about you in middle school! You’re that boxer’s kid that pushed that guy out of the way on the sidewalk, the car accident girl! I _knew_ I knew the name from somewhere, _yes_ , thank you, memory banks, you _do_ still work, I’d wondered.”

Mattie just blinks. _The car accident girl_ is not usually how people remember her. Usually it’s _the girl with the murdered father_ or _the blind girl_ or _the freak with the glasses._ _Car accident girl_ is new. “I mean, yeah. That was me. Who are you?”

“Oh, Jesus, sorry.” He sticks out his hand, and then draws it back again. “I’m Foggy. Foggy Nelson? I live a few doors down. Which you wouldn’t know, because, blind, and we’ve never spoken before? So this is weird, but it’s been driving me crazy for weeks, trying to remember your name. And I didn’t, really, not by myself, I actually Googled it at like…four am last night. Which sounds creepy, so, I mean—I didn’t Google you, to, you know, _Google_ you. I seriously was just doing that thing where it was on the tip of my tongue all the time but I couldn’t place it and I thought it was going to send me to the nuthouse before my first semester even really started, which would suck, and—yeah. Uh. I dunno. I wanted to ask.”

He says all of this very fast.

“Have you Googled every girl on this floor?” she asks, raising an eyebrow. “Or am I special?”

He stiffens. Then he must notice her lips twitching, because he relaxes again just as fast. “You are a part of my great Google campaign to put Hell’s Kitchen on the goddamn map,” he tells her, and he bounces on the balls of his feet again, excited. “Your name is a pain in the ass to spell, by the way, I had to go through the list of students in our class before I finally realized it was _c-k_ and not _c-h_. Is that when you were blinded, the car accident? I remember people saying that.”

“I’ll inform the relevant parties and get it changed. And yeah.” Mattie cocks her head at him, and listens for a second or two. Foggy seems like he’s caught between running away and asking her for her life story, which, she comes to learn, is just Foggy. For now, though, it’s a little confusing. “You’re not gonna ask, are you?”

He blinks. “Ask what?”

He genuinely doesn’t know, does he? “Never mind.”

“ _God_.” He’s grinning like a loon. “This is so weird, it’s just—I’m from Hell’s Kitchen too, and I thought, like, because it’s Columbia, we’d get people from, I dunno. Iowa or something. I didn’t think I’d meet another Kitchenette here.” He stops, and reboots. “Not that you’re a kitchenette like a Hell’s Kitchen showgirl, or—or that _I’m_ a showgirl, I just—I’m going to shut up now.”

“We lurk in the shadows, waiting for our chance.” She puts her cane up against the wall, and goes through her bag again. “Sorry to have broken your brain a little bit.”

“Nah, it’s cool, it doesn’t take much according to my sister.” Foggy rocks again, chewing on the inside of his cheek. “You’re pre-law too, right? I mean, we’re in a lot of the same classes—if you want to tell me to go away, you can, I’m just kinda—I babble.”

“Clearly,” says Mattie, but not unkindly. “Yeah, I’m pre-law.”

He makes a whining sound in the back of his throat. “Can I say something kind of mean? Like, not to you. Just—just about everyone in general.”

“Shoot.”

“I didn’t expect everyone in those classes to be so _dumb_.”

Mattie starts laughing so hard that she nearly drops her egg rolls again, and that’s that.

.

.

.

Sylvia Osborne flinches every time her boyfriend stands too close, and Mattie’s the only one who notices.

They’re in the same literature class. Mattie’s never talked to Sylvia—she always sits on the opposite side of the room, anyway, and mostly people avoid talking to Mattie unless Mattie’s next to Foggy and they can’t get away from it—but it’s impossible not to notice. The air ripples every time they’re near each other, as if Sylvia has a stick in one hand and keeps smacking the surface of a pond, over and over, louder and louder. It gets to be a scream in Mattie’s head. She’s heard this before, this sort of thing, realized what it must mean. For some reason, though, it haunts her this time. It’s a ghost clinging to her fingertips.

“What do you think of Dave Rossi?” she asks Foggy one day, because she knows he shares a class with Dave. Foggy, to his credit, doesn’t ask, though he huffs like he always does when he doesn’t get why she says or does something, like she’s speaking another language and he’s struggling to keep up.

“He’s okay. Good at Punjabi. Why?”

 _I think he beats his girlfriend,_ she nearly says, but she shrugs. “I dunno. Just wondering.”

“You wonder weird things,” says Foggy, but it’s affectionate, and he ruffles her hair with no warning, so she knows he’ll leave it be.

A week later, she’s leaving the classroom when she hears Sylvia flinch again. Mattie doesn’t think about it. She angles herself just enough that when she takes two steps she crashes right into Dave Rossi, knocking him off balance, nearly off his feet. There’s a moment when she thinks he might hit her—she can hear it in how his fists clench, in how his vocal chords buzz like he’s about to shout. _Please,_ she thinks. _Please, go ahead._ _I dare you to do it, I would_ love _to have you hit me_. Then he stills, because he must see the cane, must assume, and God, she wants to break him just for that.

“I’m so sorry,” Mattie says, but it doesn’t sound genuine at all. “Didn’t see you.”

Nobody knows what to do when she makes blind jokes. It’s half the reason why she makes them. Rossi coughs, and shifts from foot to foot. “It’s fine,” he says. Behind Mattie, and just to the side, Sylvia slips back out of his reach, holding tight to her bag. “Don’t worry about it. You okay?”

“Oh, I’m fine.” She makes herself smile wide. “No broken bones.”

She taps away before she gives in to the temptation to break his jaw.

She keeps track of Sylvia after that. She does it unconsciously, making mental notes. _When can she sit properly, when can she not? How often does this happen?_ She thinks this is how people feel at car accidents, the need to stare at the broken glass, the twisted metal. It’s like watching a wreck in slow motion. Foggy catches her listening, sometimes, and frets about it. He only asks if she’s okay once, and Mattie has to fight the urge to laugh when he does. Is she okay? Yes and no. She’s not the one who comes into class with broken ribs and a fractured soul. But she doesn’t know what to do, either, and it hounds her. She can’t report it; Sylvia would lie, or be made to. Dave would laugh it off. She can’t _ask_ , because Sylvia keeps it a secret. She can’t do anything, and every day there are more bruises, more blood pooling under the skin.

One day, though, Sylvia doesn’t come in to class. She hears another student, a woman, Elektra something—Mattie thinks they’re in the same Spanish class—go up to the professor and say in a quiet voice that Sylvia was in a car accident, she won’t be able to come in for a few days, and her wrist is broken so she couldn’t write the email herself.

Mattie doesn’t go back to the dorm, not that night. She stows her cane, instead.

She tracks him over rooftops. She’s good at it. She stays low, quiet. Follows without a sound, for hours. He stops at a drug store, buys ibuprofen. Pauses by a street corner to answer his phone. It’s dark, now. He’s talking to a woman, older. His mother maybe. Mattie feels cold, and it puzzles her, in what little is left of her to be puzzled. She thinks she’d feel—hotter, somehow. As if the anger is burning her up. Instead, she’s icy cold, chilled to the bone, and her skin is buzzing like a hive of bees. She thinks he’ll go back to his dorm, then, but instead he keeps walking. Blocks vanish behind them. She follows and follows and follows, and Dave Rossi never sees her. _Blinder than me_. It must be midnight when he stops by an alleyway to text someone, and that’s her chance. She’s silent as she drops from the fire escape, silent as she pads towards his turned back. There’s no one around, not here. No one looking at them. There are no cameras.

Mattie seizes him by the collar of his sweatshirt, and yanks him back into the dark.

This isn’t like the time with Aaron Krawczyk. Dave Rossi, he’s not a skinny eighth-grade bully with a chip on his shoulder. He’s a man used to intimidation, bigger than she is, wider across and accustomed to winning his fights. He hits the ground hard (she hears his lip split and blood hit the pavement, and there’s a sick dark thrill like burning pitch all through her veins when she realizes what it means) but in an instant he’s back up again, swinging wildly at her. He has no control. He’s used to beating on people smaller than he is, weaker than he is. He’s not used to people like her, and she uses it. Mattie ghosts sideways, out of the way, grabs his wrist and twists his arm up behind his back and shoves him forward into the wall. She puts her mouth close to his ear. “How do you like it?”

“Get off me, you son of a bitch!” He tries to stamp her instep, and she kicks his knee out from under him. She feels the bone fracture through her boot, and he howls. But there’s no one around, no one to care.

“Let me ask you again.” She yanks his arm up higher behind his back. He has a knife in his boot, and he’s fumbling for it. _Good. Let him try._ “How do you like it?”

“Get _off me_ ,” Rossi snarls again, but it’s weaker this time, too pained to hit home. He whips out at her with the blade, backwards and sideways. It’s clumsy—he’s at an odd angle and in too much pain for it to be anything else. He’s half a head taller than her but she puts him on his knees in a moment, seizing his other wrist, kicking the knife away. She can hear Stick in the back of her head. _You’re skinny, they’ll underestimate you. Use it._ The scarf scrapes against her eyelashes. She has him on his knees, his arm twisted, backwards and sideways all over again. She sets her free hand on his elbow.

“Trust me, you don’t want to move right now.” She pushes, just a little, just enough. “You gonna shut up and listen?”

“Screw you,” says Rossi, and he moves, because he’s an idiot, because he doesn’t know how bones work, how tendons work. She barely has to put pressure on his elbow before she feels it fracture, and he _screams._ The crack shudders down to her bones.

"You broke my arm," Rossi cries. "You _broke_ it."

And _now_ she’s burning. She’s a volcano, erupting. She spews magma and death. “ _You broke hers_ ,” Mattie hisses into his ear, and she hears his eyes widen in the single, gossamer moment before she slams his face into the wall.

She babbles, she thinks. She can’t remember what she says. For years afterwards, she gets flashes, but she can never remember all of it. _Never touch her again. Come near her and I’ll break you. I’ll kill you, I swear to God_ , and she means it, she _means_ it, and it’s fury and glory and terror at once. She keeps hitting him even when his breathing slows, and when her arms are finally shaking too hard to land a blow anymore, she smears blood across her mouth, and backs away.

She runs six blocks before she realizes someone’s following her. Mattie drops down behind a low wall, and waits, pulsing, quiet. The woman’s shoes are nearly silent, but her perfume is familiar.

“Damn,” says Elektra Natchios. “I was hoping I’d get to him first.”

.

.

.

She goes out with Elektra sometimes on her hunts. That’s what Elektra calls them, _hunts._ “Men hate us,” she says one night when they’re twined in Elektra’s bed. Her fingers trace the bones of Mattie’s vertebra like she’s sketching out continents. “I mean, most of them don’t, or they don’t know that they do. But society hates us, so men hate us. And when people hate you, it’s so easy to get them to want to hurt you.”

Mattie presses her cheek to Elektra’s shoulder, thoughtfully. “Is that what happened to Nathan Howell?”

“Hmm?” She smiles. “Who’s Nathan Howell?”

“E,” Mattie says, and turns her head a little. “If you think I don’t know what your handiwork looks like by now, you’re crazier than you think you are.”

Elektra laughs, low in her throat. “You don’t know what it looks like, technically.”

“Get to the point.”

“Come hunting with me.” She presses her palm flat to Mattie’s stomach, and traces a circle three times. _One, two, three._ That’s been her number lately, three. It used to be seven, and before that it was two. Now it’s three. “There are men out there who hurt women for no reason, women who can’t protect themselves. Come hunt with me and help me deal with them.”

Mattie closes her eyes again, and focuses on Elektra’s bookshelf. It’s organized by size, largest to smallest. She thinks there might be color-based organization, too, or thickness. Sometimes Elektra’s OCD shifts in strange directions. “Kiss me first.”

They take down a gang by themselves, that night, twelve men against two tall, slender women, dark-haired and flickering in the shadows. Gang rapists, Mattie knows. Being with Elektra is a dizzying spiral of violence and passion, and she thinks it’ll only end when one of them ends up dead.

.

.

.

“So did you think about it?”

Foggy’s lounging on his bed. It smells like weed in this room, not overwhelmingly, just kind of present. She knows Foggy doesn’t smoke, but his roommate’s the floor pothead, so he’s stuck with constantly smelling like he’s lighting up even though the one time he’d actually done it he’d talked about unicorns for twenty minutes and then fell asleep. Mattie tugs one of her earbuds out, not really paying attention. “Hm?”

“The guy in the street. Before you were, you know. Blind and stuff. Did you think about it?”

She stills. Mattie turns her face towards him, not sure what else to do. His heart rate is a bit quicker than normal, like he’s nervous. The Punjabi dictionary lies open and heavy on his lap, pages flickering in the breeze from the fan. (The air conditioner’s broken, and Facilities hasn’t managed to get off their fat asses to fix it, yet.) Finally, she leans back in Foggy’s desk chair, blowing air out of her nose.

“You mean did I think about it before I jumped in front of a car?”

“I mean, sure?” He shrugs. “Or did you, like, just do that thing that moms full of adrenalin do when they lift fallen trees off their kids and shit. Be badass without thinking.”

This is why she loves Foggy. Seriously. “I mean, not really, no. Nobody else saw it, and I did. So.”

“Hm.” Foggy waggles his pen between his fingers. Then he says, “Okay,” and for some reason it feels like forgiveness, even though, for this, at least, she has nothing to be forgiven for.

.

.

.

If Mattie tells the truth, which she rarely does after Dave Rossi, she knows from the very first moment that something is different about Elektra.

People stay away from her, most of the time. She has her barriers, and not many of their classmates will cross them. She hears two of the frat boys talking about _that Natchios chick_ once, and one of them says, “She looks at you like she’s going to cut your balls off if you get too close.” It’s more accurate than they know, really, and later, tangled in Elektra’s hair, Mattie laughs about it. Elektra is beautiful, the vicious, prideful, astounding sort of beauty that comes with sharp blades and bright poisons. Foggy’s a bit scared of her, but Mattie’s intoxicated. Elektra wears on the outside what Mattie can only ever keep hidden, locked away in her guts, a dazzling kind of darkness that pulls her under like a riptide, tumbling and drowning.

She’s never been interested in anyone, truly. She’s never let herself had the time, never thought she could afford it. Stick had pounded it into her, over and over again. _We’re weapons, Mattie. We’re meant to be alone. Screw who you want, but don’t get attached. Besides, you should know better than anyone, women aren’t healthy for you._ She’d been dragged along on Skye’s sexual orientation crusade against the nuns when they were fifteen and stupid, so she knows, and has known, that she’s at least bisexual, though what else she _could_ be is beyond her. Mattie knows, logically, that there’s nothing wrong in wanting Elektra, that it’s genetic, not a sin. But sometimes in the dark she keeps her eyes closed and wonders if God will punish her for this.

He does when Elektra leaves, the last press of her mouth on Mattie’s smearing lipstick that tastes like blood.

.

.

.

“Have you heard about this guy?” Foggy asks. “The Man in the Mask.”

Mattie purses her lips. It’s safe to; her back is turned to Foggy, and she’s putting things into her bag, so he can’t see her expression. “The man in the what now?”

“Someone’s been going around beating the crap out of people.” Foggy flings the newspaper to his desk. “I don’t know. Some people say it’s a man, some say it’s a woman, whatever. Some masked psycho is, like, beating the shit out of people, and nobody knows who he is or what he wants.”

“I don’t think we’re supposed to know how vigilantes’ brains work,” Mattie says. “If we could, they wouldn’t exist.”

“Word,” Foggy replies, and she curls her hand into a fist, because there’s nothing else she can ever do with it.

.

.

.

“Who are you?” Karen asks her, dripping with rain, with blood. Mattie curls her fingers tight over the flash drive.

“Doesn’t matter,” she says, and she runs like the devil is chasing her. She has a sinking feeling, though, that she’s already caught.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Before people get confused, yes, I do mean Skye from AOS! It's mentioned in one of the redacted SHIELD documents that she stayed at St. Agnes Orphanage, which is the same place Matt is sent. So! I kind of went a little crazy with it. But only a little.
> 
> I am on Tumblr as shu-of-the-wind, and FB and Twitter as shuofthewind, in case you're interested.
> 
> Face-claim for Mattie Murdock: Jessica de Gouw. I mean, look at her.
> 
>  


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